On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 08:09:34PM +0100, Michel Talon wrote: > Gnuplot is the prototypical example of a port which is badly managed. There > are far too many dependencies which are absolutely *non necessary* There is > absolutely no necessity of having TeX (in any form whatsoever) to run > Gnuplot.
Agreed. That is why it is an _option_ now. > inkscape. But the cherry on the cake is that gnu plot requires pdflib, which > is a non free library such that the FreeBSD project cannot ship a working > gnuplot binary (that is gnuplot will not start without libpdf for which one > needs to download source and compile). The reliance on pdflib is also an option. But I would agree with you that it should be off by default, instead of on. I seem to recall that the pdflib output didn't really work when I tried it, so I dropped it. > occur, a port maintainer should only include the *strict minimum* > dependencies necessary to make the port work, it is not his job to include > the whole kitchen sink of dependencies that could be useful in some cases. So you would advocate to set all options to off be default? Why not submit a PR to that effect? > Similarly maxima has a TeX dependency which has absolutely no reason to be > here. Looking at the port Makefile version 1.75 (maxima 5.26.0_1), there is no TeX dependency. > operation). But chasing inappropriate dependencies would be far more useful > if one wants to arrive at a situation where one can envision to use binary > packages for most installations of FreeBSD And who is to say what is "appropriate", other than the respective maintainers of the port in question? In my opinion, packages are a dead-end street. They might be convenient but they are also "one size fits all". Which as your message demonstrates is not the case. :-) Your post got me thinking, so I checked which terminals are available in a gnuplot that only includes the options X11, GD and CAIRO: canvas cgm corel dpu414 dumb dxf eepic emf emtex epslatex epson_180dpi epson_60dpi epson_lx800 fig gif gpic hp2623a hp2648 hp500c hpdj hpgl hpljii hppj imagen jpeg latex mf mif mp nec_cp6 okidata pbm pcl5 pdfcairo png pngcairo pop postscript pslatex pstex pstricks push qms regis starc svg tandy_60dpi tek40xx tek410x texdraw tgif tkcanvas tpic vttek x11 xlib xterm It seems that PDF (via cairo) and SVG are supported in this case. I haven't tested SVG, but pdfcairo seems to work OK. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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